Search Issues: Update 2026-09-16 - Repairs to some of our search pages are ongoing. Thank you for your continued patience!

Meanwhile, elements of the Advanced Search are working and the Alphabetical Listings are working, too.

huaxin.

Headword: 
huaxin.
Principal English Translation: 

the white lead tree, a large tropical tree that produces edible pods (Leucaena diversifolia, Crescentia alata) (see DFC and Karttunen)
Sahagún, Bernardino de, Antonio Valeriano, Alonso Vegerano, Martín Jacobita, Pedro de San Buenaventura, Diego de Grado, Bonifacio Maximiliano, Mateo Severino, et al. Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (Florentine Codex), Ms. Mediceo Palatino 218–20, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, MiBACT, 1577. Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter, Alicia Maria Houtrouw, Kevin Terraciano, Jeanette Peterson, Diana Magaloni, and Lisa Sousa, bk. 11, fol. 123v. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/11/folio/123v/images/c9dadaa9-... . Accessed 13 November 2025.

Orthographic Variants: 
huāx
IPAspelling: 
wɑːʃ
Frances Karttunen: 

HUĀX-IN large tropical tree that produces edible pods (Leucaena diversifolia, Crescentia alata) / cierto árbol que da unas como algarrobas comestibles, de tierra caliente (C), guaje (T) In C, Z, and X the vowel of the item is long. In T it is consistently short.
Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 82.

Attestations from sources in English: 

See an image that represents huaxin in the Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs, ed. Stephanie Wood (Eugene, Ore.: Wired Humanities, 2020-present).